Composed as a love letter to his wife, it is undoubtedly Mahler’s most popular piece of music, mainly thanks to its extensive use in director Luchino Visconti’s 1971 film Death in Venice. Sign up for our weekly newsletter and get them delivered straight to your inbox. Receive a weekly collection of news, features and reviews
I do miss the spacial perspectives of the old CBS sound, though arguably the reverse was true in that case and one craved a degree or two more impact from the flabbergasting sonorities of the first movement. On the first appearance of the symphony in 1968, Deryck Cooke observed that Rafael Kubelik was “essentially a poetic conductor and he gets more poetry out of this symphony than any of the other conductors who have recorded it”.
Two things were evident in the momentous first performance in Salzburg in April 1982. But good as the Solti is, it isn't in the Karajan class as an interpretation. The recording (surely not Bernstein?) In each case there is a passionate, even desperate identification with a certain attitude - but only in the last resort, for what it is worth; suddenly the scene changes and another attitude is being identified with - but again, only for …